Sound

Organised Sound

In using the term ‘sound’ instead of music, we’re following the lead of composer Edgard Varese, who called his own music “organized sound.” This side-steps all the conventional requirements of music: to follow certain rhythms, meters, scales, structures and instrumentation. Varese explained: “Indeed, to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise. But after all what is music but organized noises?” (Varese & Wen-Chung, 1966, p. 18 in Berkowitz, 2024)

Adam Eric Berkowitz (2024) “Artificial Intelligence and Musicking: A Philosophical Inquiry.” In Music Perception Volume 41, Issue 5. University of California Press. June 2024

https://online.ucpress.edu/mp/article/41/5/393/200671/Artificial-Intelligence-and-Musicking

Spatialised Sound

We’ll be exploring the affective potential of spatialised sound. Unlike visual phenomena, that we can only see when infront of our eyes, we’re immersed in sound – we can hear behind, above, beside and below us. We can feel sound in our bodies – sound is vibration. And sound moves through 3D dimensional space over time – up/down, left/right, forward/backward. You can even hear when something tips, rolls or spins. To achieve these kinds of effects with media, you need to send sounds in varying volumes to multiple speakers – or you need to record sound spatially to begin with, by using an ambisonic microphone for example.